Shoshana Moya said she's seen the overcrowding at the Bernalillo County jail with her own eyes, and she never wants to experience it again.

"The pods are overcrowded, people sleeping on boats," Moya said. "It's ridiculous."

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Boats are similar to cots. Moya said when she was in the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center last month for violating her probation, she and her fellow inmates were crammed into cells like sardines. Three people, she said, lived in a two-person cell. One slept on the floor.

"It's an awful place to be," Moya told Action 7 News. "There's a bunch of people out on the floor, that just sleep on the floor in bunks 'cause there is nowhere to put them."

Bernalillo County Commissioner Wayne Johnson said the flow of criminals through the MDC is being clogged by a slow court system.

"We don't want to rush justice, but we want to make sure it is timely. And right now it simply is not," Johnson said."We can't get folks through the system fast enough."

He added that 40 percent of the MDC's population is composed of people accused of a felony crime who have yet to go to trial.

Meanwhile, Bernalillo County Commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins believes part of the solution was a recently failed proposal to ship inmates out of MDC and to jails in Texas.

"I voted for it," Stebbins said. "I thought it was important for us to at least make that effort."

But two others on the board didn't agree with the proposal to move the inmates. The county is trying to settle a years-long lawsuit that cited overcrowding issues and poor medical treatment.

Now a federal judge is stepping in, ordering a meeting to ensure the county commissioners come up with a solution to the growing population problem. That meeting is scheduled for May 2, though there is no order that a resolution has to be made in that one meeting.